The pace quickens

We didn't stop in Sardinia, but pressed on to Mallorca, the largest of Spain's Balearic islands. It's hard to know why you make the decisions you do when you're travelling. So much is done by feel. Sardinia has many more anchorages than Sicily, and God knows, we're desperate for an anchorage, but something was pushing us along, not the least of it the absence of strong winds from westerly quarters. We are heading west from now on.

We all agree that breakfasts are the best meal of the day

For two days we willed the forecast easterly winds to materialise, but they didn't. We motored, and we motored some more. Towards the end of our third afternoon at sea, Alex stopped the engine and allowed the boat to drift with the current on a dead calm surface. Claudia and I tentatively lowered ourselves down the ladder and swam alongside and around Enki as she wallowed. There is something outrageous about swimming in the open ocean. You ought not to be able to do it. You'd be mad to even think of it in Australia. But here - well, nothing was moving for as far as the eye could see, and below the water, only our legs treading the clear sapphire blue liquid.  Below that, who knew.

At 7.30 pm we watched the sun go down and a full moon rise in perfect synchronicity over horizons ahead and behind us. We ate dinner in the cockpit, laying a table and using china plates and Turkish ceramic serving bowls. The candle stayed alight.

But dinner isn't too bad either - rice paper rolls on Turkish plates

She's found her sea legs

Then, while we were passing the dishes down below and preparing ourselves for the night watch, the air around us began to stir, and by 9 pm we were sailing. The direction wasn't bad either. We sailed the rest of the way, more or less, to the cliffs of Mallorca, hitting 8 knots across the flat waters of the bay of Palma. We could have kept going, to be honest - it was that much fun - but we were tired, all of us. On the fourth night after our departure from Sicily we ate squid ink pasta and vongole and tuna (all staples of Sicilian cooking) at a pavement table under the shadow of a Spanish church. Our host was a German who spoke perfect English. Palma is a cosmopolitan city.

Enki close-hauled on a flat sea in a moderate breeze

Milling about at the entrance to RCNP marina

Palma cathedral

It's also a yachting hub, the biggest in the western Mediterranean.  The night lights around us at the Real Club Nautico de Palma glitter red. Superyachts with masts so tall they're considered a potential hazard to air traffic are obliged to show a red anchor light, even in port. For glamour though they can't compete though with the floodlit cathedral of Santa Maria. That huge church (the second largest Gothic cathedral in Europe) took me completely by surprise as we closed on the city from the sea - its shock value is something like that of Chartres cathedral rising from the wheat fields of northern France.

Palma's a good place to source nautical bits and pieces. We've had an almost dead electric winch (the one which helps with the mainsheet and the genoa furler) for some weeks now. Alex has being doing forensics on it  - in Levkas we put on a new, thinner furling line, thinking the old one might have been too thick and the friction causing the winch to stall under too much strain. That wasn't the problem. Then we pulled apart the electric motor housing hoping that the problem might be carbon dust around the brushes which could be vacuumed out. Sadly, no. Instead of carbon dust, Alex found oil in the electric motor. He suspected a faulty seal between the gear box and the motor, and anticipated having to replace the whole unit somewhere down the line, perhaps Gibraltar, perhaps the Canaries. But as of today, the problem is fixed - a new seal, and a new motor (the gearbox was ok). I might just keep on winching manually though - the effort gives the shoulders a new kind of definition!

We are of course now in Spanish territory which means another language, another internet provider (woeful pre-paid internet options in Spain compared to Italy, by the way), another mindset. Claudia, who has very firm opinions about such things, judges the Spanish to be cooler than the Italians - but really, what is Spain, and what is Italy? These nation states are so modern, comparatively. There are more ancient loyalties, provincial and religious, which you get to understand only after you've been kicking around somewhere for much longer than we plan to stay around Palma.

Western entrance to Palma cathedral (cathedral also below)

Heat shield

Which flavour? Italian ice-cream rules, even in Spain

Palma streets

Part of the Parliament building - Palma is the capital of the Balearics

The Catalan painter Joan Miro spent the last 30 years of his life on Mallorca, and though it's the last thing I expected of this crowded summer holiday island, I have to think that the brightness and joy and freshness in his works owes something to the spirit of this place as well as to his creative genius.

Light and variable

If our engine hadn't failed, we wouldn't have hung about on Ponza Island for another two days, and that would have been our loss.

Ponza is glorious in June, like a delicate flower just coming into bloom - its air is soft, the sea  fresh and soothing and, at the beginning of the season, the locals are relaxed.  Apparently this exquisite flower wilts quickly though. In July and August, it has the life all but crushed out of it by huge crowds of holidaymakers. That's the cost of doing business.

We hit the sweet spot of the summer solstice. That day was riotous, with fireworks continuing through until midnight. Shortly after lunch, a flotilla of fishing and pleasure boats, strung with bunting, streamed out of the small harbour in a tight cluster, honking their horns like delirious peak hour commuters, as a Vesuvius of fireworks and coloured smoke exploded over the village.

Alex's desperate foray into Ponza on the day of the festival to get help was surprisingly fruitful. He turned up not just an ordinary village mechanic, but Gianlucca, a chief engineer on big ships who was  back home for a few weeks, holidaying with his wife and baby. After an hour of troubleshooting, he spoke the dreaded words, electronic problem. Nine out of ten emergency mechanics would have thrown in the towel at that point, but not Gianlucca. He stayed another two hours, and tracked down our engine failure to a burned out fuse in the "board".  He told Alex, "Next time you get a boat, you get a normal engine." But Gianlucca, like Alex, knows that there's no going back from electronics in engines, whether they be in cars, ships or sailing boats. The world is in love with electronics. Supposedly they make engines more reliable, but when they fail, there's nothing much the home handyman can do. It's off to the workshop.

Gianlucca followed through by putting Alex in touch with Volvo engine technicians at the Base Nautica Flavio Gioia marina at Gaeta on the mainland (the Volvo round-the-world race fleet made a stop here in May). It was agreed that we would sail to Gaeta the next day.

That evening, for light relief,  he and I took a little dinghy ride, first to the "baths" carved out of the cliff face for Roman holidaymakers two thousand odd years ago, and then into the town for an aperitif and pizza. We let our hair down. It's been pinned up quite tightly these past few weeks.

A fresh north-westerly wind blew into the anchorage at about 1.30 am, waking us up. Alex and Dave paced. Some time during the evening, a dive boat had parked directly in front of us, restricting the distance we had to pull up the anchor under sail (we had anchored Enki out deeper that afternoon, using the dinghy as a tug). Up at first light, we waited a while, but when the wind started to build, and the dive boat showed no sign of life, Alex made his move, and he did it brilliantly.

It's 35 nautical miles from Ponza to Gaeta. We'd calculated a five to six hour trip, given the forecast for freshening winds. But two hours after we got underway, the wind started to drop out. Time to start the engine....ah, no. No engine. Enki, to her credit, never stopped going forward, even at a crawl of 1.4 knots.  For a big heavy boat, she moves so well in light winds. Very light, and variable winds. For an hour or so we were almost becalmed. The sun was ferocious. Alex never stopped thinking. He worked the sails harder than he's probably had to since he stopped racing J24s. The gennaker came out for the first time, a kind of gennaker called code zero, which is shorthand for "a dream to hoist and furl and gybe". We gybed a few times to give way to trawlers crossing our path. Towards the end of the day, Alex poled out the genoa as well as carrying the gennaker.

I stayed too long on the helm, and melted down, oppressed by the heat and the captain's high expectations which I could not meet.  It happens.

We were pushed into a berth by a work boat from the Base Nautica Flavio Gioia, and here we remain until....well, who knows. On Monday the Volvo technical team will come aboard with their diagnostic instruments, and then we'll know what part we need, and how long it will take to arrive in Gaeta. It feels much too soon to be back in a marina, waiting for work to be done. Much too soon. But these are teething problems, we tell ourselves. Enki is a sound boat.  She will settle down. We will settle down.

Meanwhile, Pops writes to us from Turkey. Motor fixed? She flies to Athens on July 5 to meet us...and she leaves us on July 11. We are desperate to see her. I said we didn't make plans, but Pops is not a plan. She's a need. My need. I'll try not to dwell on that. Monday, Monday...